Offers & Tracking

This article covers some basics on performance marketing: offers and tracking. These two topics are crucial components of performance marketing, as offers are what marketing revolves around and tracking is how we tell who gets credit for sales and app downloads.

What is an Offer

In general, an offer is a product or service that someone wants users to know about and act upon. Two typical sorts of offers are: items for sale on a web store and mobile app downloads (usually free apps).

Some offers aren't products or services directly, but instead are ways of collecting potential customer information—notably surveys and lead generation—for other marketing efforts.

Who is Involved with an Offer

Advertisers have offers they want to promote. Publishers have website or mobile app traffic from users, known as inventory, that could be used to promote those offers. Users are people on websites or mobile apps that see and may potentially interact with these offers.

Networks—clients of Affise—are brokers between publishers and advertisers. They use their Affise platform to provide their publishers with a menu of offers from a variety of advertisers, and simultaneously provide advertisers opportunities to promote their offers to a variety of publishers. Advertisers provide different offers to the network. Publishers connect those offers to different types of inventory they own or purchase.

Based on research and experimentation, networks and publishers can find and deliver quality traffic—a better-than-average percentage of users that click on and complete an advertiser's offer.

Click Flow

Clicks

When a user clicks on one of your offers, what they’re clicking on is a tracking link: a special URL that your Affise network uses to register the click, in a way that users won’t notice. To register that click, Affise creates a session: a way of recording that a specific user clicked on a specific offer, so we know if that offer becomes a conversion. Affise records this click in your platform, then sends the user to the offer’s page or mobile app. This happens in the fraction of a second and is completely invisible to the user.

What is important here: Publishers need to use links your Affise platform provides to track clicks.

Conversions

Conversions tracking uses one of two different methods, depending on whether the offer is on a web site or a mobile app.

Impressions

View of an advertisement is tracked each time a user loads a webpage where an impression pixel is placed on.